


Conversations

by TwistedK



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Aftermath, Gen, M/M, PTSD, This is just sad shit, War, look away, there's no sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:15:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22474711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwistedK/pseuds/TwistedK
Summary: Erwin and Levi share a house at the end of the war.
Relationships: Levi/Erwin Smith
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	Conversations

Despite the absence of the reveille or the panicked clang of weapons, Levi still starts, awake. This time it's early enough in the morning that the sky has barely shed the dark, the sun still weak in the horizon, and the air is cool. He tries to slip out of bed as quietly as he can, remembering the floorboard that creaks, when Erwin beside him reaches for his hand.

"I'm awake," Erwin says and Levi takes it as permission to spring into the room. The floorboard creaks under his foot and the thin blanket they had shared whistles against his skin. He thinks he's losing his touch when his steps across the room are audible, the shroud of silence slipping from his grasp. He approaches the window, shutters still bolted, and stands to the side of the frame. Through the slits of the wood, he watches the empty road outside.

Erwin watches him in turn and he forces himself to stretch in their small bed. He flexes his toes and reaches over him, but it leaves him feeling silly and much too large for the space. His body craves to do something other than lay there. Ghosts of bruises left behind by uniform belts warm until they itch.

"What should we do today?" Levi asks him, still peering out of the shutter slats. His voice is clear, as if he's been awake this whole time. "I think we're out of food."

Erwin hears _out of food_ and has to fight the urge to calculate how many of their own horses they can spare, how far until the nearest farm, how much they have left to trade, how much force is he willing to press on the farmers, if needed. 

"Perhaps the market when they open," he says instead. "Or maybe lunch somewhere?"

The question goes unanswered. They both know that Levi is not willing to eat other people's food, around other people. Perhaps he will never be ready. Erwin hopes anyway.

Levi squints at the sun finally peering over the distant hills and cutting through the slats, right across his eyes. A rooster crows and he almost mistakes it for a scream. "Sure," he spares Erwin a glance. "Don't look so surprised. I don't feel like cooking."

"I can cook," Erwin smiles.

"You can boil water sometimes," Levi rolls his eyes and opens the shutters finally.

Light floods the room and, for a moment, he's blind. White is all he can see and the calm he had woken up to trembles in complaint. He steels himself before he turns, his heart racing suddenly at the thought that perhaps he's not yet awake. That maybe when he turns Erwin will not be there bathed in sunlight, smiling gently at him in the way he's only learned in the past few months. That maybe he'll turn around and there will be a pile of blood and entrails and body parts on the bed and he'll know that it's Erwin.

"If only you'd let me, Levi," Erwin says.

Levi turns around at the sound of his name and finds Erwin, missing only an arm, sitting on the bed. His heart continues to flutter in his chest, the tightness in his spine sitting there like a loaded rifle. It must show on his face because Erwin's smile falters at the corner. There he is, golden and naked in the sun. The sight is still a novelty, to see a body completely unarmed. Even Levi still sleeps in trousers.

The small house, awarded by the state for their outstanding service and exemplary courage, warms quickly as Levi opens each window shutter while Erwin washes himself on the sink. Animals in the shed next door stir awake and Levi watches them from a window. He pictures going through each step of skinning them, gutting, cleaning, drying, cooking. Each sheep and each goat is rationed perfectly in his head: One goat for ten soldiers can last five good days on the field, if they have potatoes on hand. Three in combat, accounting for lost supplies and the hunger that fear and fatigue bring in tow. Four, if soldiers are lost.

He leaves their feeding and tending to Erwin, who seems to enjoy the task, while he takes his turn washing himself and preparing the last of their bread for breakfast.

Erwin meets the morning and the animal stink of the shed outside their house. Being new, it's in perfect repair—every board and every nail in place. Every morning he secretly hopes one of them will come undone; perhaps a startled goat breaks a fence or a rogue storm at night destroys the shed altogether. Anything to fix and put together. Instead, as with all mornings, nothing is broken and he heaves the heaviest bag of feed over his shoulder, opening the small perfect fence with a boot. The sheep and goats meet him, grateful for his care. He watches them eat their fill and remembers the way his men had chased after these while Titans chased them. The hungry chasing after the hungry.

Without so much as a blink, he takes a rake and tries to break his back over the small work Levi allows him. They don't speak often, or as often as he had imagined they would once the war was over, so he doesn't know Levi's reasons. There are days when they go without speaking. Levi is always doing something with his hands, unable to sit still for long periods, while Erwin reads, always losing his place, forgetting what he read and starting again. It is as if the war had squeezed all the words out of Levi when it silenced everyone else who now blossom in prose when the peace had settled. 

Perhaps the emptiness on his left sleeve is a constant reminder of guilt, and Levi is shouldering the burden of housework to make amends. Perhaps without the commander's bolo, Erwin is no longer an object of respect for Levi. That he is nothing more than an man prone to spilling potfuls of stew and taking long to dress himself.

So he rakes more, moves bales of hay that don't need to be moved, crouches over planted vegetables with more attention than they need. Erwin moves and moves and moves, if only to feel his body in its familiar exertion. To remember how to use his remaining limbs in a time when they can afford to sit around and just exist. To have some semblance of control over this small dominion.

Soon, the smell of coffee reaches him and he finds Levi at the door of the house with a steaming cup in hand. He has probably been standing their a while. "Don't hurt yourself," Levi says with a glint of jest and Erwin, with barely a glisten of sweat, chuckles despite the uncertainty in his chest.

They reach the market at the same time vendors begin to set up their stalls. With an empty sack in hand, Levi stands beside Erwin. His back is straight, his stare even more. Erwin stands beside him, just as still and just as stiff. In the shadow of a building, a little ways away from the market, they wait for the goods to be laid out in neat and plentiful rows—glistening fruits and freshly plucked chickens. They watch the abundance this peace has brought them, and they both want to run back to the house outside town.

"We're too early again," Erwin says in an attempt at normalcy. These mundane and harmless things feel like cotton in his mouth. Levi grunts in return. He watches the activity: scanning the crowd for threats, for daggers pulled out of cloaks, for bombs poorly hidden in crates. Erwin wants to see it for what it is: a marketplace coming to life, starting to shake sleep off its edges. The reward for their sacrifices, the treasure that many had died for. This is what peace is supposed to look like. He is unsure, however, if this is how it is supposed to feel.

Levi breaks the silence this time. "Thinking of how to evacuate these people in case a titan comes barging in?"

Erwin can't help the chuckle that escapes him. "I was thinking how many would be left behind and how many we can spare for them."

"We had one company on this side of Wall Rose," Levi starts. "Half of that would be gone if those assholes breached." He jerks his chin to the large gap on the stone wall before them. A titan had broken through there a long time ago. Back then, it wasn't a matter of _if._ The titan kicked the wall in and did kill half the Survey Corps stationed there. Now, people are carting their horses and donkeys through the gap to the other section of the city. From where they stand, they could see another gap in the outermost wall. Out there, people lived.

"I'd say about one platoon for attack, one for defense. Even if the commotion spreads them, they can fall into formation with little problem," Erwin says, looking up at the remaining towers and rebuilt stone buildings that could anchor soldiers as they swing through the square. Stalls and booths prop up in the sunlight coming through the gap on the wall like wildflowers, each more colorful than the next. The smell of cooking meat and coffee crawls through the square.

"Perhaps one squad is enough for recovery. We only need to take the living. The rest can be retrieved later."

Levi scoffs, heading towards the now living market, "Not fucking mine, I hope."

Victory had afforded them this: a sack full of fruits, cured meat, even fresh fish that Levi hadn't ever had until after the war. Erwin had only eaten it in childhood but never prepared it. They had to consult one of the books in the city library on how to gut and clean it, with a knife in Levi's hand and a pair of glasses perched on Erwin's nose. Victory affords them things like libraries and evenings when they spend time in a small kitchen gawking at that alien thing on their pan before being left in awe of the softness of its flesh.

Victory also gives Levi a keen sense for the presence of what the war left behind. Men and women like Levi and Erwin who try to walk in marketplaces, to be grateful that they shouldn’t be needed anymore, but unable to stop staring at that huge gap in the wall. It’s a thing Levi can’t look away from. It sucks the world around him until all that’s left is that damn hole, him, and the ringing in his ears. He loses himself in the space between the broken stone in a sort of liminal existence. It stares right back with its vastness, filled only with the memories of noise, of trembling ground, of the crack of bones and meat under the rubble.

The high toned voice of a woman catches his attention at the periphery. She beckons to a man carrying his own bag of produce, also staring at the same space Levi had. His back is straight in attention and anticipation—a contrast to the flow and ease of everyone and everything else around them. As if woken from sleep, the man starts, and as he turns to his companion his eyes meet Levi's.

They exchange a nod. The man realizes who's standing behind Levi and presses his fist over his heart, standing even taller. Erwin returns it before the man nods at Levi again and lets himself be pulled away.

"Let's head back if you're done," Levi grumbles, suddenly feeling spent.

Lunch is forgotten as soon as they return to the house. A visitor waits for them at the door and, without fail, Levi walks ahead of Erwin with a hand to the dagger tucked in his belt. Erwin takes the sack of food from them and greets the visitor with a tone reserved for the bearer of bad news. In times of great distress, a presence at the door had meant leaving through that door themselves without guarantee of returning.

"Commander, Captain," the man at the door greets in return, fist over his heart. Despite being in simple shirt and trousers, he looks combat-ready. And grown. Levi is surprised how he’s grown more after they had parted ways. "I'm sorry to intrude."

"Kirschtein," Levi almost sighs. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Erwin notes that Levi doesn't correct Jean the same way he corrects civilians when they address him by his rank.

"I thought I'd check in," Jean says, making way for the two at the doorway. Levi doesn’t bother hiding the fact that his hand was on the hilt of a weapon. He knows Jean has his own hidden on his person, too. All of them do. All of them are relieved they don’t have to use it. Sometimes relieved as well when they have to. "We were told there's a pack of coyotes roaming outside the city and you have livestock and, um..."

Levi levels him with a stare, as cold and hard as an order to lay down his life for humanity. "Well? That it?"

From inside the house, Erwin chides him softly. He thinks Jean doesn't hear him. If Levi notices the tips of Jean’s ears turning pink, he doesn’t say.

"Yes, sir."

Levi looks him up and down, assessing him quickly for injury. It’s a hard habit to shed. When he finds none, he wants to order Kirchstein to drop and give him thirty push-ups, if only to ensure that he is ready and fit for a mission. Jean submits to the assessment and stands at attention, hands folded behind him. Satisfied, Levi reaches for an apple they had bought earlier and shoves it at the boy.

"Here," he says. "Now, go away." He closes the door on Jean, only for Erwin to open it again.

"Jean, thank you," he says, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and Jean feels himself blush all the way down his neck. "Please come again sometime, we'd love to have you and the others for a meal."

"We don't," Levi says later when it's just the two of them. "The last thing I want is to see those kids."

Erwin says his name, the beginning of a soft reproach. But it's too early in the day for this conversation, one of the few that they share. This is something reserved for the deep nights after the candle is blown out. For when they wait in the dark for the earth to tremble, for when years of military training simmer low and steady under their skin, for when sleep feels too much like a luxury they don’t know what to do with. For when the silence becomes a suspicious thing.

It's too bright outside to be talking about leaving the past behind and living for themselves, for enjoying the peace that they had fought for, for the appalling inability to do so. "The last thing I want is for those kids to be coming here," Levi says, surprised at the ease of admitting it. "You keep blabbering about moving on from the past. Well, we are their past."

There's no argument that follows because Erwin also finds it easy to admit to himself that despite his best efforts, he misses the past. He misses the unreasonable demands of combat, the quickness of his mind, the small hard-won authority over the immediate course of their lives, the certain brand of closeness that war squeezes all of them into. Even the small and fleeting victories then feel more urgent, more well-earned than this lasting one. He misses how certain they had felt about the aftermath of war, the palpable desire they had stoked for it. They had waited for it and, now, it still feels like they're waiting.

Peace makes them restless and they wither with it. It is a purgatory that feels sure to end in hell.

"You're right," Erwin agrees. Levi hears the hesitation and chooses to ignore it.

It hadn’t taken long for either of them to understand that they aren’t built for a slow life. Perhaps a long time ago when Erwin was a boy in his father’s study and Levi brushed his mother’s hair, they had been made to flow with a softer tide. But duty had required an armor and the blood and titan ooze crusted around them like the perfect steel suit.

The day ebbed on outside as noon turned into afternoon. Levi washes clothes and hangs them outside while Erwin sits on the porch to read. He offers to help, even just to hand Levi damp shirts, and Levi accepts. They both can’t stand to be alone, it seems, but they can’t stand to keep talking. They share nothing else but the war.

Erwin says the problem is that this armor doesn’t wash off. Levi says the problem is that the opposite of this restless shit is war and the only way to get that is to start one.

Erwin had given him a look—halfway between a joke and a conspiracy—that made Levi laugh so hard that his eyes turn watery. Erwin had never seen him laugh so openly, his voice deep and scruff against his lungs. He thinks, in that moment, that maybe all of this was worth it.

“Sometimes, it feels as though we are slowly dying,” Erwin says, more to himself than Levi.

“Isn’t that just getting old?”

“Maybe,” Erwin says. “I hoped the end of that war would mean that people could live their lives however they pleased. That they could enjoy every stage of their life without the threat of annihilation looming right outside the walls.”

Levi takes the empty basket and heads for the house. “They do. You got what you wanted.” Erwin looks at him. “Look, you wanted it for them, you didn’t want it for you. You wanted answers. You got them.”

And he doesn’t argue. “What did you want, Levi?”

“I thought I didn’t want to die,” he says. “We should start cooking if we want to eat today.”

Just like that, the conversation is left alone to be picked up later when they have more answers to questions they don’t want. They both wish there was something else to talk about but years of fighting to stay alive teaches them to say only what matters. Erwin remembers that morning. “Should we go somewhere to eat instead?”

The afternoon is quickly turning dark, the sky bleeds pink and purple, and Levi takes a long look around. He considers it and their conversation and acquiesces. 

They find themselves at a tavern at the edge of town, a small ramshackle thing built almost into a broken in part of what used to be Wall Rose. The place was erected at the very start of the city’s reconstruction. It looked as if the city rebuilt around it, forgetting its tiny presence as it buried it in shadows. The owner had one eye shut with a gnarled scar that extended from the corner of his mouth to the top of his skull.

“Commander, Captain, good to see you,” he greets them, warm and eager, and personally ushers them to a table at a darker corner. 

“Thank you,” Erwin says. “Please, just call me Erwin.”

“Same,” Levi adds. The man smiles, almost laughing, and repeats their names twice.

Despite never having met the two, their names roll off his tongue in familiarity. Levi follows quietly and notices that most of the tables in the corners are filled with people who stood and sat as they did—straight, quiet, observant. A few of them, familiar to Levi, nod in acknowledgment before averting their eyes. Suddenly Levi regrets coming. The tavern feels too large and he longs for the walls of the house. He forgets that people stare.

“Levi,” Erwin calls to him and he sits beside him rather than across. “We won’t stay long. Just a meal, I promise.”

But even just a meal is too long. Levi’s thoughts are running, darting from one table to another, murky with threats and judgement. The candles on the wall make too many shadows too close to their table. The large tables leave too much out of sight. He realizes they’ve been seated at the most private corner of the establishment, which is also the farthest from the door. He catches a glance or two from the other patrons and finds himself grasping at their meaning. The back of his neck starts to burn when he can’t discern anything—if they’re planning to attack, if they are thinking of the conversation they’ll have when they leave, if they will speak about the captain and his commander emerging from a bloody war and now shacking up outside of town. He used to be able to judge a person’s next move with a single look.

“Levi,” Erwin reaches for his hand, on the table, exposed. “If you stab someone here, I doubt we will be welcomed back.”

It is only then that Levi realizes he’s been clutching a steak knife. In the same moment, the moment floods into him. The tavern is not as dark, not as quiet. The tables at the corners are not as stiff, conversation flowing between diners. None of the attention is on them. Beside him, Erwin smiles. His eyes shine in patience and even after he loosens his grip, Erwin keeps his hand atop his.

The aroma of food comes next, strong and delicious. The owner waits on them personally and offers them drinks and sweets with their meal—a generous portion of beef and thick, rich gravy—that Erwin graciously declines for them both. Levi is full, which still makes him sick after years of only ever being half filled at most, but is grateful. He reaches for their coins to pay when a patron rises from her seat so quickly that the plates rattle on their table.

The woman couldn’t have been older than one of the kids who had followed Levi around during the war. Her steps are sure, and she didn’t flinch under Levi’s glare. He keeps his breathing level and Erwin straightens a fraction, only noticeable to Levi’s heightened sense. Both he and Erwin brace themselves for the impact. 

One of the things they had expected to come with peace is blame, and Levi has heard every iteration of it in the past months. Erwin has scolded him, as if he were a petulant child, after he had grabbed a man by his collar, threatening to throw him into a titan’s maw after the man spit on Erwin and said he was the only monster in this entire affair.

After the scolding, Erwin had folded into himself, an envelop around that man’s words. He had laid in bed wide awake, making a list. In his heart remained were names of all the people he had commanded, every body piled atop each other, every step towards his own goal. Shame tints his memories as he starts to forget names. They become smudges on his long list. He had really only wanted answers with humanity’s survival a happy accident for his goals. And he had to be ruthless and calculating to achieve both. 

The trouble with peace is it gives them time to think. When Erwin thinks, he finds that perhaps he wasn’t as justified as he once thought he was. That perhaps he really had just sent all those people to their deaths, as betting pieces for all the gambles he had made. That perhaps there was simply no time to think otherwise.

Levi had learned to take the blame, hoping that somehow Erwin won’t take it upon himself.

The woman stops at their table. Lesser men would have been leveled by the intensity and redness of her eyes, irritated by a powerful sentiment about to burst out of her lips. 

“You,” her voice trembles. “You brought my brother home. Th-thank you.”

The words hit them differently.

Levi’s chest squeezes suddenly, his mouth dry. A sound escapes him but doesn’t carry meaning. His nerves feel like a string pulled too tight and he’s stuck in that moment before breaking. The tension in her voice leaves him lightheaded. It makes him want to vomit everything he just ate.

Erwin smiles. The corners of his lips pull mechanically, a measured sweetness executed perfectly with years of practice in courts and offices. But inside, the word slip off him like rain on a green wool coat. Truly, the dream of peace had brought more joy than this and the performance of warmth exhausts him.

“We thank your brother for his service,” Erwin says, reaching for the woman’s hand. Heads turn their way, approving nods and smiles all around. She shakes his and Levi’s and insists on paying for their meal.

“Please allow me,” she says. “You are heroes to us all.”

On the side of the barely used dirt road back to the house, Levi throws up. Erwin waits for him in silence.

Everything is a reminder of the war. The walls, the food, the quiet, the people. The very fact that they’re not dead reminds Levi of the struggle to maintain that. And these people, these people with their markets and their casual visits and their complete and willful ignorance of its price make Levi retch. They know nothing of heroes, he thinks. They know nothing of what makes a hero, of how one needs to be baptized in the blood of his own comrades to become one. They understand little of how Levi, Humanity’s Strongest, had to break their children into something other than themselves to keep them and the rest of the city alive. How when it was time to come home, no one knew how to break them back into themselves. These people knew nothing of the gap in the stone wall that calls and mocks every soldier that walks through it. They are stupid with their complacency, careless with this precious thing they call peace.

And he is sick with it. Sick of it. If he was going to be reminded of it, he might as well live it. At least he can sink a blade into the flesh of a Titan. There is no blade for memory.

He barrels into the house by himself and grabs the closest thing his hand meets. Erwin sits outside and listens as things break. The small house trembles. This, too, is one of the few conversations they have. The crickets sing, screaming into the night.

**Author's Note:**

> no idea what happens in the manga after erwin died.


End file.
